


Halfway

by AnnetheCatDetective



Category: The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Genre: Bonding Over Shared Trauma, Character Planned to Die but Didn't, Character is haunted, Exhaustion, M/M, canonical injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 12:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18778063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: After finishing the Walk, Ray Garraty feels half-dead, and he spends most of his time wondering when he'll get the rest of the way there.He's not sappy enough to call a guy he never even made it with his other half or anything, but if the shoe fits... After everything, life could make less sense than this.





	Halfway

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PositivelyVexed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/gifts).



> An extra treat, because it was a delight to try my hand at a kind of a sort of a fix-it.

    “Garraty.”

 

    Ray opens his eyes. “McVries?”

 

    “In the flesh. Well…” He snorts.

 

    Ray is used to looking through the world. Seems it’s all he has done lately. No one knows quite what to do with him, not since he came back the way he did. He’s used to not feeling anything, when someone does talk to him. He used to imagine he’d be thrilled… that when he saw his mother, his girl, when he came back to them again after the whole thing, that he’d feel… something.

 

    For long hours now, he feels nothing at all, and then in short bursts it’s as if he feels too much. When he remembers Peter McVries, he feels everything in the world all at once. He’s sick with it.

 

    He sees him in his mind’s eye all the time, as he was at the end. But not in the room with him, not…

 

    “You haunting my ass?”

 

    “Jack shit else to do.” Peter shrugs.

 

    “You look better as a ghost than you used to when you were alive.” Ray smiles, and it aches his face, so used to a passive lack of expression. It’s not true, exactly. Peter had been handsome, he’d known it. The knowledge sat uneasy in the pit of his stomach and he’d lied to himself and known it anyway. Or maybe handsome was the wrong word for it, but he had a face that made you want to look at it, just the same. He had-- has?-- a face that could fascinate you. Everything about him had fascinated Ray. He looks better than he had by the end of the walk, that’s all.

 

    “I look better as a ghost than you do right now.” He says, and then his expression softens, into a look Ray doesn’t think he ever saw on it, wouldn’t know to imagine if it wasn’t real. “I’m the only one of us who died, Garraty, so how come you’re the ghost?”

 

    “I don’t know. I didn’t know… how it would be. Dammit, you-- You know?”

 

    “Seeing ‘em all get their tickets punched?” He lies on his back, floating by the bed. “Everyone thinks he can handle it ‘cause you see it on TV and you think you could do it same as anybody, could handle looking at it up close, and then it’s different?”

 

    “It was different when it was you.” He admits. “I couldn’t… after it was you. We did the whole thing together, and we ended together. And you… and I… Maybe I am a ghost. Maybe it’s all been in my head and you won the whole thing and this is just what being dead’s like. Dreams about shit.”

 

    “Yeah?” Peter rolls onto his side, though he’s still just floating in place there.

 

    “Yeah. Why not? Why the hell not? Ever since, you know, sometimes I’m just not here. I’m there, or I’m nowhere, or I’m just somewhere else and I see shit. Imaginary shit. Like the whole world’s just in my head for a while, and then it turns off but I don’t turn on. Like nothing’s real except late at night when I can’t sleep and I think about…” Ray trails off, and Peter just grins at him.

 

    “Me?”

 

    “Didn’t say it was you.”

 

    “There was no way we could’ve both come out of it. And it was always going to be you.”

 

    “Why me?”

 

    “Because the two of us _made_ it, Ray. And when we started getting close… dunno. It was too late. And I knew it would be you, because I couldn’t do what you did. I couldn’t cross the finish line with you dead. I never wanted to.”

 

    “It wasn’t even real, when I did.”

 

    “It was real enough. You’re alive.”

 

    Ray shrugs. He doesn’t feel it, and when he does, he wishes he wasn’t.

 

    “Halfway.” He says. “McVries? Peter? I thought…”

 

    “Yeah.”

 

    “I thought I’d be with you by now. And they won’t let me. Shut up in this house and my mom can’t look at me without crying and I don’t even know what to feel when she does. Jan came around a little and we’re done now, ‘cause I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know what to say at all. They ought to just put a bullet in me.”

 

    “Why waste a bullet? No one gets what he wants when he wins. You lie there until it’s over and then it’s just over. They know you’re half alive and all they have to do is hide you and wait. But you are half alive.”

 

    “I’m halfway and you’re halfway.” He smiles again at that, and reaches out a hand. “A ghost and an empty.”

 

    “Ray…” Peter floats closer. Holds his own hand up, so that his fingertips just touch Ray’s. It’s like static electricity and an icy chill, but it’s something he can feel, and he craves more of the feel of it. “What if you could be the first to really _win_? What if you could _live_?”

 

    “And then what?”

 

    “Make the bastards pay. Cash, if not anything real.”

 

    “It’s too much, Peter. I’m tired.”

 

    “I’m not. Not anymore. I’m halfway and you’re halfway. What if…”

 

    Ray nods. Peter moves to hover over the bed behind him. His whole body is alight with that feeling, buzzing. A ghostly arm wraps around him.

 

    “Little late… for you to jerk me off.” He jokes.

 

    “I would’ve.”

 

    The hairs at the back of his neck stand up, and it feels like when an icicle drips right down the back of your collar for just a moment.

 

    “I would’ve let you. I mean… if we’d… If it had been like anything else. If we met anywhere else. Or if-- I mean… if I didn’t have a girl when we did, I guess. I dunno. I’d have done it for you, too, if you had.”

 

    “We will.”

 

    “Ghosts jerk off?” Ray laughs. He feels more alive than he has since…

 

    He feels more alive than he has in a while.

 

    “I wanna try something.”

 

    “You can _try_.” He says. He can feel where Peter touches him, but he can also feel it’s not real-- or, not solid. That he sinks in if he isn’t careful not to, isn’t careful to keep the illusion.

 

    Peter moves his arm to lie over Ray’s arm, though, and then he sinks in, all the way.

 

    Ray can feel him.

 

    “Relax.” Peter whispers, only this time it’s from inside Ray’s head. “Don’t move, and don’t try not to move, just… relax.”

 

    Ray does, watches in fascination as his hand lifts and flexes. After only a moment, it drops, but after a brief rest, he rolls onto his back.

 

    “Peter?”

 

    “Two halves, Ray. What’s it make us?”

 

    He can’t say it. It’s too much.

 

    Peter doesn’t leave him, though. He’s a blessed cool and a sense of energy. Slowly, while Ray lies limp, Peter pushes him through gentle exercises. The toll that had been taken is immense, and to go from the Walk to the inactivity he’d lapsed into… he’s not sure how he didn’t die, really, but Peter works when Ray falls into those periods of catatonia. He can only do so much at a time himself, but every time they try, he finds he can exert a little more control, can pull Ray back from the brink of atrophy. Maybe he hadn’t been at Death’s door, but he was pulling into Death’s driveway before Peter came to him. Maybe he had to get so close for Peter to reach him in return.

 

    He imagines pulling up in a car and honking the horn, Death’s driveway, and Peter scrambling out the upstairs window and shimmying down a drainpipe, and the two of them roaring away with the top down, while Death himself shakes his fist from the front porch. And the car is his body, and maybe the two of them just take turns driving forever.

 

    Whole.


End file.
